It begins as a favour: one colleague cannot see the printer, so another 'shares it on' from their own PC. From that day, some of the office prints through two PCs in a chain - and the chain breaks whenever the middle PC feels like it.
A re-shared printer is the worst fault in office printing because it looks random. The host PC is on, the printer is fine, half the staff prints happily - and the other half cannot, for reasons that seem to change daily. The pattern underneath is simple: PC-A hosts the printer, PC-B connected to it and then shared that connection onward, and a group of users now prints A-through-B. Their printing depends on two PCs, two queues and two sets of permissions, and it fails whenever PC-B sleeps, reboots or goes home early - even though the real host never missed a beat.
Example chain. If a group's printing follows one ordinary PC's working hours while the real host is fine, a double share is the first thing to suspect.
\\PC-B\Printer instead of the host are the giveawayEvery hop adds a failure. Jobs render and queue twice, permissions are checked twice, and the middle PC's sleep settings, updates and user habits become part of everyone else's printing. Fault-finding doubles too, because a symptom can live in either hop - technicians waste hours testing the healthy host while the middle PC sits asleep under a desk.
\\ACCOUNTS-PC\OfficePrinter, entering the host's printing account when askedWrite down the one correct address - host name and share name - in the office IT note and tell the team plainly: the printer is connected from that address only, and only the host shares it. If colleagues keep needing to share it onward because the host is badly placed, treat that as information: the printer wants a print server or a network port of its own, not a longer chain.
Watch the correct single-host sharing setup, so nobody needs to 'share it on' ever again.
▶️ Watch Full VideoOpen the printer in Devices and Printers or Settings and check its name and port - a shared printer's name normally shows the host it hangs off, for example Printer on PC-B. If the name names a colleague's PC instead of the print host, you are on a chain.
There is no single friendly switch on a normal Windows PC; changing sharing needs the rights to do it, and beyond that it is a team rule backed by one documented connection address. If re-sharing keeps happening, the setup itself is asking for a print server.
Move one PC at a time in a quiet hour. Each moved client is fixed permanently, and the rest keep printing through the chain until their turn comes.